Anxiety - My Experience

You do not know where it comes from. You do not know what causes it. You do not know where it goes. 

Your head becomes heavy. You feel that your heartbeat has increased but it has not. You feel something heavy in your chest. You feel that you have difficulty breathing but you have not. 

Bubbles of fear-like feeling passes through your chest frequently. Like some passing soft heavy item pressing through the wall of your lower inner chest. You worry about hearth disease as the feeling is close to your heart, literally. You feel like a patient of lungs as you feel like suffocating. But if you become aware of it and try to breathe, you see there is no such problem. 

These are the symptoms I have been going through since middle of 2020. Job stresses exacerbated by the 24-hour concern about COVID-19 have perhaps compounded to make me experience those bubbles of fears and choking chest. These, according to the psychiatrist I am consulting, are clear signs of anxiety. You would be able to live with that if it were not worsened by sleepless night. 

I have been a light sleeper all my life. Minor disturbances like dogs barking in the neighborhood or a person opening a door cause me to wake up at night. Once my sleep is thus disturbed, I find it very very difficult to go back to sleep. From my young days. 

But 2020 has been at a different level. I struggle to sleep in the first place. I cannot push thoughts storming through my mind. My head churns one idea after the other. The last thing I think about is sleep. Then I realize I have to sleep. But cannot push those thoughts out. The situation is worse if I wake up in the middle of the night. I spend hours turning on the bed and still cannot sleep. 

All this compounded my problems and I finally decided to consult about anxiety as a lot of symptoms matched with that based on online research. And indeed Anxiety it was. The doctor gave the following major information:

> Anxiety is a common mental state in contemporary society. 

> It is caused by hormonal issues and worsened by stress. 

> It does not lead to depression. 

> It is not a life-threatening condition. 

> It can be cured by medication. 

I started taking medicine, one for cure and other a soporific to ease my sleep. Almost 8 months now since I started. I immediately started sleeping well, probably due to the soporific medicine. My levels of anxiety and the bubbles started subsiding. Gradually, my anxiety medication was increased and soporific was lowered. Now I do not take soporific but need to take the main medicine for alt lease a few more months. 

However, the bad part is, since the recent resurgence of COVID in April 2021, I have been feeling worse. I still sleep well but the bubbles, which almost subsided a couple of months ago, have returned with a vengeance. 

But what I have learned is to better cope with the disease. I try to make my life better organized with schedule for going to bed and waking up. I try to do exercise (walking and yoga, no gym stuff) regularly. But the bubbles persist and perhaps I have to learn to live with them and start ignoring them so that they get frustrated and decide to leave me alone. Let's see how that goes. 

  

Bubbles of fear-like feeling occurring frequently through your chest. Difficulty